The Grapple sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “This here’s Major Dover in the Quartermaster Corps south of Columbus,” he rasped. “Where the hell are they? You lazy sons of bitches, y’all tryin’ to lose the war for us? How’re we supposed to get the shit to the front if you hold out on us?…What do you mean, I can’t talk to you that way? I’m doin’ it, ain’t I? An’ if those convicts don’t show up in the next hour, I’ll sic my colonel on you, and we’ll see how you like that!” He slammed down the phone without giving the MP he was talking to the chance to answer back-always a favorite ploy.

  He knew Travis W.W. Oliphant was useless in these turf battles. He knew it, but the MP didn’t. And the unhappy fellow evidently didn’t care to take chances with an angry senior officer. The convicts arrived less than half an hour later.

  “About fucking time,” Dover snarled at the driver who brought them. “You should have got ’em here when you said you would, and saved everybody the aggravation.”

  “Sir, I don’t have nothin’ to do with that,” the driver said. “They load the truck, they tell me where to go an’ how to git there, an’ I do it.”

  Dover wanted to tell him where to go and how to get there, too. He feared he’d be wasting his breath. Instead, he glowered at the convicts. “You are going to work like mad sons of bitches, or else.”

  “Or else what?” one of them said scornfully.

  “Or else I will personally shoot your worthless ass off, and I’ll laugh while I do it, too,” Dover replied. “You reckon I’m funnin’ with you, you go ahead and try me.” He waited. The convicts worked. He’d expected nothing else.

  Sergeant Michael Pound had been in the U.S. Army a long time. He’d spent a lot of that time getting barrels to do what he needed them to do. He wasn’t just one of the better gunners who wore green-gray coveralls, though he was that. He was also a damn good jackleg mechanic. A lot of barrel men were. The more repairs you could make yourself, the less time you had to spend in the motor pool. The less time you were out of action, the more trouble you could give the Confederates.

  “Distributor cap, I bet,” he said when the mechanical monster wouldn’t start up one rainy morning east of Columbus, Ohio. “Damn thing gets wet inside too easy. It’s a design flaw-it really is.”

  “Can you fix it?” asked Second Lieutenant Don Griffiths, the barrel commander. He was perhaps half Pound’s age: a puppy, like most second lieutenants. Unlike a lot of shavetails, he had a fair notion of what he was doing. He also didn’t seem to think asking questions threatened his manhood.

  “Yes, sir.” Along with a.45, Pound carried a formidable set of tools on his belt and in his pockets. He had the engine louvers off in nothing flat, and got the distributor cap off the engine almost as fast. One glance inside made him nod. “Condensation, sure as hell.” The loader, Cecil Bergman, held a shelter half over his hands while he worked. The rain would only make things worse.

  “What can you do about it?” Griffiths asked. “A dry rag?”

  “Even better than that, sir,” Pound said. He was stocky and wide-shouldered-built like a brick, really. His brown hair had begun to go gray and to retreat at the temples. His eyes were pale in a broad face more Scots than English: marksman’s eyes. He pulled out a small bottle half full of clear liquid. “Absolute alcohol,” he explained. “I’ll rub a little where it’ll do the most good. It evaporates like anything, and it’ll take the moisture with it.” He suited action to words.

  The distributor cap went back on. So did the louvers that protected the engine from small-arms fire while letting its heat escape. Pound scrambled down from the engine compartment. “Fire it up!” Bergman yelled to the driver.

  There was a cough, a bang, and then the flatulent roar of a barrel engine coming to life. “Nicely done, Sergeant!” Griffiths said.

  “Thank you, sir.” Pound clambered up to the turret and opened his hatch. He paused before climbing in and sitting down behind the gun. “Shall we get on with it?”

  “I hope so, anyway,” Griffiths answered. “If this rain starts thawing out the ground, though, we’re liable to bog down.”

  Pound didn’t think that likely. It was a little above freezing, but only a little. He guessed the rain would turn to sleet or snow before long. But he didn’t want to argue with Griffiths-which, considering how firmly armored in his own competence he was, was no small compliment to the young officer.

  They rattled west in company with six or eight more barrels and several squads of foot soldiers. Only two of the barrels were the old models, with an inch-and-a-half gun. The improved machines, of which Pound’s was one, featured an upgunned, uparmored turret and a more powerful engine to handle the extra weight. Their 2.4-inch cannon still weren’t a match for the three-inchers new Confederate barrels carried, but they were the biggest guns the turret ring in the chassis would allow. And they were good enough to give the U.S. machines a fighting chance against the best the enemy could throw at them.

  “After Pittsburgh, moving so fast seems strange,” Griffiths said.

  “Yes, sir.” Pound nodded. In Pittsburgh, they’d measured progress in blocks per day, sometimes houses per day, not miles per hour. That was a fight of stalks and ambushes and strongpoints beaten down one by one. Now they were out in the open again, rolling forward. “Only a crust here,” Pound said. “Once we break it, they haven’t got so much behind it.”

  As if to give him the lie, a Confederate machine gun opened up ahead of them. Even through the turret, Pound had no trouble telling it from a U.S. weapon. It fired much faster, with a noise like ripping canvas. The Confederates, with fewer men than the USA, threw bullets around with reckless abandon.

  “Can you see where that’s coming from, sir?” he asked Lieutenant Griffiths.

  Griffiths peered through the periscopes built into the commander’s cupola. He shook his head. “Afraid not, Sergeant,” he answered. “Want me to stick my head out and have a look?”

  He didn’t lack for nerve. The barrel was buttoned up tight now. You could see more by opening the hatch and looking around, but you also ran a formidable risk of getting shot-especially anywhere in the neighborhood of one of those formidable machine guns.

  “I don’t think you need to do that, sir,” Pound said. Now that he’d found a junior officer he could stand, he didn’t want the youngster putting his life on the line for no good reason. Sometimes you had to; Pound understood as much. Was this one of those times? He didn’t think so.

  But Griffiths said, “Maybe I’d better. That gun’ll chew hell out of our infantry.” He flipped up the hatch and stood up so he could look around, head and shoulders out of the cupola. Along with a flood of cold air, his voice floated down to Pound: “I don’t like staying behind armor when the foot soldiers are out there naked.”

  Michael Pound made an exasperated noise down deep in his throat. Yes, a crewman in a barrel had face-hardened steel between himself and the enemy’s attentions. An infantryman had nothing but his helmet, which wouldn’t even keep out small-arms fire. On the other hand, nobody used antibarrel cannon or antibarrel mines or Featherston Fizzes to try to knock out individual foot soldiers. Lieutenant Griffiths wasn’t thinking about that.

  “There it is-about one o’clock,” Griffiths said. “Do you see it now, Sergeant?”

  As Pound traversed the turret, he looked through the gunsight. Sure enough, there was the malignantly flashing machine-gun muzzle. “Yes, sir,” he said, and then, to the loader, “HE!”

  “HE!” Bergman loaded a white-tipped high-explosive round into the breech.

  The gun roared. The noise was tolerable inside the turret. To Lieutenant Griffiths, out there in the open, it must have been cataclysmic. Soldiers joked about artilleryman’s ear, but they were kidding on the square.

  When the machine gun kept firing, Pound swore. A 2.4-inch HE shell just didn’t carry a big enough bursting charge to be very effective. He’d seen that in Pittsburgh, and he was seeing it again in among the trees here. “Give me another round,” he told Cec
il Bergman.

  “You got it, Sarge.” The loader slammed the shell home.

  An instant before Pound fired, Don Griffiths groaned. Pound didn’t let himself pay attention till the second HE round was on the way. He saw the Confederate machine gun fly one way and a gunner, or some of a gunner, fly another. But he had no time to exult; Griffiths was slumping down into the turret.

  “How bad is it, sir?” Pound asked, swearing at himself-if he’d knocked out the gun first try, the lieutenant might not have got hit.

  “Arm,” Griffiths answered through clenched teeth. He had to be biting down hard on a scream. Sure as hell, his left sleeve was bloody, and blood dripped from his hand down onto the shell casings on the fighting compartment floor.

  “Can you wiggle your fingers?” Pound asked. Griffiths tried, but gasped and swore and shook his head. He’d had a bone shattered in there, then-maybe more than one. Pound took a morphine syrette from the wound pouch on his belt, stuck it into Griffiths’ thigh, and pushed home the plunger. Then he said, “Let’s bandage you up.”

  He had to cut away the sleeve to get at the wound. He dusted it with sulfa powder and packed it with gauze. As soon as he could, he’d get Griffiths out of the barrel and send him to the rear with some corpsmen.

  “You’ve got yourself command here whether you want it or not.” The lieutenant sounded eerily calm, which meant the morphine was taking hold.

  “Even if I did want it, sir, I wouldn’t want it like this,” Pound said, which was true. “You’ll be back soon.” He hoped that was true.

  He stuck his own head out of the cupola. With the machine gun gone, all he had to worry about were ordinary Confederate infantrymen and maybe snipers in the trees. He looked around. Sometimes luck was with you, though he wished it would have shown up a little sooner. But he did see a couple of corpsmen with Red Crosses on smocks and armbands and helmets. He waved to them.

  “What’s up?” one of them yelled.

  Before Pound could answer, a bullet cracked past. He ducked. He knew it was a useless reflex, which didn’t mean he could help himself. He hoped it was a random round. If it wasn’t, the medics would have two casualties to deal with. Unless, of course, I get killed outright, he thought cheerily.

  “Got a wounded officer. Forearm-broken bones,” he called after he straightened up.

  “All right-we’ll take care of him,” the corpsman said. “Can you swing sideways so the barrel covers him while you get him out of the hatch?”

  Pound liked that idea about as much as he liked a root canal. Expose the barrel’s thin side armor to whatever guns the goons in butternut had up ahead? But the medics weren’t armored at all. Neither was Lieutenant Griffiths, and he’d gone and proved it.

  Sometimes you needed a root canal. It was no fun, but you had to go through with it. This wouldn’t be any fun, either. If they hustled, though, they ought to get away with it. “Will do,” Pound called to the medics. He ducked down into the turret and told the driver to make a hard right and stop.

  “Jesus! You sure?” The protest came back through the speaking tube.

  “Damn straight. I wouldn’t ask you if I wasn’t,” Pound answered. “Come on. Step on it. The lieutenant’s bleeding all over everything back here.”

  “It’s not so bad now.” Griffiths sounded as if he hadn’t a care in the world. The morphine must have hit him hard. Well, good.

  Snorting, the barrel turned. The movement wasn’t so sharp as it might have been. Try too tight a turn and you might throw a track, in which case you wouldn’t go anywhere for a while. When Pound was satisfied, he yelled, “Stop!” and the barrel did. He undogged the side hatch and sketched a salute to Don Griffiths. “Out you go, sir. You did good. Hope I see you again one day.” He meant it. He wasn’t the sort to waste compliments on people who didn’t deserve them.

  “Thank you, Sergeant.” Awkwardly, Griffiths scrambled out of the barrel. Pound helped him leave. The corpsmen took charge of him once he got through the hatch. They eased him down to the ground and got him moving away from the front. They were probably relieved to help somebody able to move on his own: they didn’t have to lug him in a stretcher.

  After waiting till they’d gone some distance from the barrel, Pound clanged the hatch shut and dogged it. He yelled into the speaking tube: “All right, Miranda-square us up again.”

  “You bet, Sarge!” The barrel jumped as the driver put the thicker steel of the glacis plate and the turret between the crew and the enemy.

  Peering through the periscopes in the commander’s cupola, Pound saw the heaviest action off to his left. He ordered the barrel over that way. For now, it was his.

  II

  Clouds and rain and sleet shrouded the North Atlantic. A few hundred miles to the west of the Josephus Daniels lay Newfoundland. To the east of the destroyer escort, probably, lay trouble. The British never stopped sending arms and men to Newfoundland and to Canada to give the rebellion against the USA a helping hand. Lieutenant Sam Carsten and the skippers of his fellow picket ships did everything they could to keep the limeys from getting through.

  He halfheartedly swore at the weather. It made enemy ships all that much harder to find. The rain and sleet even interfered with the Y-ranging gear. The wireless waves bounced back from raindrops, too. A good operator could peer through the interference, but it sure didn’t make life any easier. And the old-fashioned Mark One eyeball had a very short range here.

  He swore only halfheartedly because the weather suited his own needs very well. He was a short step away from being an albino. His skin was pink, his eyes pale blue, and his hair white gold. It was even whiter these days than it had been when he was younger-he’d spent almost thirty-five years in the Navy now. Summer in the tropics was a never-ending misery for him. Summer in Seattle was a misery for him, and that took doing.

  His executive officer was a young, auburn-haired lieutenant named Pat Cooley. If not for Sam, the exec might have been the the fairest man on the ship. Cooley had gone through Annapolis, while Sam was a mustang who hadn’t made ensign till some years after the Great War.

  Cooley was a comer, a hotshot. He’d have a ship of his own before long. Sam didn’t want the exec promoted out from under him, but he knew things worked that way. As for himself, when he walked into the recruiting office all those years ago he never dreamt he would wear two stripes on his sleeve. He’d just been looking for a way to escape walking behind the north end of a southbound mule for the rest of his life.

  The Josephus Daniels pitched down into the trough between two waves. Seas on the North Atlantic weren’t quite so fierce and mountainous as they had been earlier in the winter, but they weren’t any fun, either. “You all right, Mr. Cooley?” Sam asked when the exec grabbed for something to steady himself.

  “Yes, sir. Just clumsy.” Cooley’s eyes were green as a cat’s. Just now, he looked like a cat that had rolled off a bed and was trying to pretend it hadn’t.

  “Insides not turning inside out?” Sam had rounded the Horn more than once. Those were the only seas he knew that put the North Atlantic to shame. He hadn’t been seasick. He might sunburn in anything this side of a cloudburst, but he had no trouble keeping his grub down.

  Pat Cooley was a good sailor. The North Atlantic seemed intent on showing good sailors they weren’t as good as they thought. Here, though, the exec shook his head. “Not giving me any trouble right this minute,” he said: a precise man’s cautious answer.

  “Skipper?” That was a very young, very junior lieutenant, junior grade, named Thad Walters: the officer responsible for the care and feeding of the Y-ranging gear. He looked up from the green blips on his oscilloscope screens. “I’ve got something showing.”

  “A ship?” Sam asked. Even troubled by the weather, the Y-ranging set was more likely to pick up limeys trying to run the U.S. gauntlet than lookouts were.

  But the j.g. shook his head. “No, sir. It’s an airplane. Have we got a carrier in the neighborhood?”

/>   “If we do, nobody told me, that’s for damn sure,” Sam answered. Nobody’d warned him a British carrier was operating in the neighborhood, either. That could be very bad news. A beat slower than he might have, he heard exactly what Walters said. “Wait a second. An airplane?”

  “Yes, sir. Y-ranging gear sees one. Speed two hundred. Bearing 085. Range…Range is twenty-five miles and closing-he’s heading our way.”

  “Just one, though?” Sam persisted. “Not a bunch of them?”

  Walters shook his head. “Sure doesn’t look like it. The set could pick them out at that range.”

  “All right.” Carsten turned to the exec. “Call the men to general quarters, Mr. Cooley. If he finds us in this slop, we’ll have to try to shoot him down.” He’d been attacked from the air before, even back in the Great War. He didn’t enjoy it, not even a little bit.

  “General quarters. Aye aye, sir,” Cooley said. Klaxons hooted. Sailors started running like men possessed. They dashed into the turrets that held the Josephus Daniels’ two 4.5-inch guns. And they manned all her twin 40mm antiaircraft guns and the.50-caliber machine guns that supplemented them. The unknown airplane would get a warm reception, anyhow.

  As soon as Sam heard the snarl of an airplane engine off in the distance, he said, “Evasive action, Mr. Cooley.”

  “Evasive action-aye aye, sir.” Cooley was a better shiphandler than Sam was. Sam had never had his hands on a wheel till he took over the Josephus Daniels. He was a lot better now than he had been then, but the exec was better still. “All ahead full!” Cooley called down to the engine room, and the throb of the destroyer escort’s own engines picked up.

  Cooley started zigzagging the ship across the ocean, lurching now to port, now to starboard, at random times and angles. But the Josephus Daniels was only a destroyer escort, not a full-fledged destroyer. She had a smaller crew, a smaller hull, and a smaller powerplant than a destroyer proper. She couldn’t come within several knots of a real destroyer’s speed. One of these days, that would hurt her. Sam felt it in his bones. He hoped today wasn’t the day.